Category: Research

We’re off to see the wizard!

We're off to see the wizard!
Tomorrow we leave on our grand adventure in the UK! The house is mostly packed up and we’re pretty much ready to go. We’ll be spending some cool time with WeatherGirl‘s mum for a few days, and then head down to Colchester to find a place to live and school for Sub-Evil Boy.

The official purpose of the sabbatical is to do computer science research in evolutionary computation with cool people at the University of Essex in Colchester. I’m sure I’ll also be working on my blogging and photography quite a bit as well, and hopefully being a better on-line citizen (more time for comments and such).

This is the poster I made to hang by my office door for the year away to remind people why I never seem to answer when they knock. I wrestled quite a while with this because I kept trying to make a text document with a few pictures added. Lying in bed the other night it finally flipped and I realized that I wanted to make a document that was mostly pictures with a little text added, and voila! Probably comes from reading Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding comics this summer, but it was fun!

Tags: Photography

Related posts

Anyone know of a “text” sheet program?

'Steward spreadsheets the pizza order' by Caterina
I’m writing some (Ruby) scripts to help my sister (a biologist) process and analyze some of her field data, and I keep running into spreadsheet programs that are too damn smart for our own good. She, like many/most non-programmer types, uses spreadsheet programs to organize and rearrange her data. Problem is that Excel keeps deciding knows better than we do what kind of data we have, and how it should be formatted. I can’t tell you how much time we’ve lost because it decides to rewrite dates and times in ways that break my script, not to mention inserting wacko header info, changing the line break characters, and deciding that animal tag labels are numbers in scientific notation. And, sadly, OpenOffice tends to play similar games, although the details are different.

With sufficient effort we can no doubt beat Excel and its friends into doing what we want, but I’m tired of this and would much rather have a tool that doesn’t fight us all the time. Does anyone out there know of a spreadsheet like program that’s more of a text editor and less like a word processor? I’d preferably like something simple, open source, and easy to use so I can sell it to my sister and (perhaps more importantly) she can sell it to her co-workers/co-authors as an alternative to a highly entrenched status quo. I’d like it to by default treat cell contents as basic text, and not race around interpreting and reinterpreting the data.

Anyone know of such a thing? Please? Whimper?

Also, sorry for the silence around here. In three weeks we move to the UK for a year and there’s rather a crap load of stuff that needs to be done. Doesn’t help that some bored stupid punk wanna-be hackers (no, really, I’m not pissed) have hacked our Computer Science lab at the U for the second time in a month. Damn, but that stuff ticks me off. Not like I could be getting any real work done instead of chasing these script kiddies around.

No tag for this post.

Related posts

  • No related posts.